Frontier Chronicles: Prologue — A New Age of Heroes

A saboteur that never boarded torments a crew. A pirate delivers a sealed case to the wrong buyer and starts a chain of events that climbs all the way to a corporation's blackest secret. A detective assembles the evidence in a cold white lab — an ancient slug, a wrecked radiator, a corporate ledger — and solves exactly the crime she was meant to solve, while the larger pattern she's standing inside of goes on assembling itself, unseen, behind her.

This is tagged cyberpunk, but it isn't noir, and it isn't grimdark. If you're here for a hardboiled loner against a rotten megacity, that's not what this is — it's closer to an inversion of that story. The universe is cold and rigorous, but the characters in it aren't, and that contrast is deliberate.

The hard-SF tag, though, is exact. Every battle, every plot turn, every capability is derived from real physics — orbital mechanics, light-lag, thermodynamics, the works. There is exactly one deliberate deviation from established theory, and you'll know it when you see it. Everything else plays fair.

If that sounds like your kind of thing, read on.